The present invention relates to an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based network system to handle up to 50M of bidirectional traffic for each customer. The network can scale from a few customers to 1000+ customers using active and/or passive splitting and utilises the best aspects of sub carrier multiplexes, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and ATM while avoiding the problems of these technologies.
The Architecture handles groups of up to 32 customers sharing the ATM bandwidth of a common ATM pipe, many groups co-existing on the same system. Special provision is made for Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) to reduce the delays so that ordinary telephony will work.